Walk the Fine Line
by wecouldexplorethegalaxy
Summary: When Stiles gets a job over the summer to fund grad school at the Beacon Hills psych ward, he doesn't expect to run into so many people he used to know. He also doesn't expect to find himself wondering if they're crazy...or if he is. (AU)


This job is a gift, Stiles tells himself, crossing the parking lot toward Beacon Hills Hospital's psychiatric ward at midnight. This job is a gift, and Mrs. McCall is a goddess incarnate for getting it for him, and he owes Scott for like, ever, for giving her the idea. It's close to home, Stiles tells himself, and it's in his field, and he needs the money to get through his senior year of undergrad. He's busting his chops to graduate on time as it is, so he can't afford to be picky. Otherwise he'd never be out here in the middle of summer, alone, taking online courses and living with his dad.

It's also ball-shrivelingly creepy, and Stiles is going to have serious words with the night crew about replacing the burnt out, crackling lamps in the parking lot, because there's no moonlight and no starlight and those bushes are rustling ominously and Stiles is suddenly reminded that his dad is sheriff and probably a bunch of the people he's going to be locked in with for the next eight hours were locked in there because of him. He shivers and pulls his red hoodie more tightly around his shoulders, quickening his pace.

He walks through the front doors just as Mrs. McCall is leaving.

"Good luck," she says, pulling on her jacket and dropping a kiss on his forehead. "Have fun."

"Oh yeah," Stiles says, laughing. "Gonna have a blast."

The lights are on low now, and the door falls shut behind him with a final sounding thump. He can hear the distant sounds of the ER, but Stiles goes the opposite way, towards where the more permanent residents are housed. The fluorescent lights hum over head as he passes empty rooms with their empty cots, curtains hanging heavy around them.

He pulls out a key given to him by Harris, the stuck up douchebag in charge of the night shift in the psychiatric ward, and unlocks a pair of thick metal doors separating the wards. Stiles steps through and locks the doors behind him, thinking absently that those were probably a fire hazard, but the hospital had been built in the 70s and he's not sure fire safety had been invented then.

This ward obviously hasn't been updated since then either, Stiles thinks, dragging the toe of his not-quite-regulation sneakers along a black scuff mark on the greenish linoleum. Everything here is greenish, Stiles thinks—the walls look like the color of mint ice cream after you throw it back up, and the plastic over the lights has yellowed to amber, though Stiles can see that further down the hallway the lights are completely off.

The sounds in this ward are different—here there's no beeping monitors, no shouting doctors; there's some laughter, and if Stiles were more dramatically inclined he might even call it gibbering. He can hear someone crying, far off, but he can't tell where because everything echoes in these blank green hallways.

He bites his lip and shakes it off, scanning the hall until he spots Harris' office door, just out of the pool of light. He knocks on the door and hears a bored, "Come in," so he does, wiping his hands nervously on his pants.

"Hi, can I have a flashlight?" he asks. Harris, a pale man with dark hair and a permanent sneer, raises an eyebrow scornfully, though he hands over a heavy black flashlight almost at once.

Stiles feels better once it's in his hands; it's heavy enough to use as a weapon, if he has to, he thinks guiltily.

Harris is seated behind his desk with his legs stretched out, feet resting on a stack of paper work. He has a paper back on his lap, and he goes back to it as soon as he hands Stiles his flashlight.

Stiles dithers for a moment, shifting from side to side, unsure what to do.

"Well? I told you what to do this morning. Do you need a refresher?" Harris asks, dislike oozing from his words.

"Uh, no, thanks, awesome, later," Stiles says, baffled but more than ready to leave the unpleasant man behind. He shuts Harris's door behind him and clicks on his flashlight, sweeping it back and forth across the dark hall. His duties are simple, which is part of the reason the job is such a gift—all he has to do is patrol, make sure the inmates are asleep and comfortable, and report if something looks wrong. It's such an easy job he's the only one who has to do it. Which means he'll be wandering alone. In the mental ward. In the dark.

Stiles thanks god the rooms are clearly labeled, so at least he probably won't get lost maybe. With a hapless shrug, Stiles starts walking, glancing into rooms as he goes. Most occupants are asleep, barely moving lumps under blankets, but in one room he sees eyes looking back at him, twin cats-eye gleams in the darkness. He's not ashamed to admit he nearly lost it then, but he pulls himself together pretty quickly. His dad had warned him about this when he decided to go into psych. "Stiles," he'd said, "You're gonna come across a lot of whack jobs." Stiles had laughed and said, "That's the idea, daddy-o."

But it's quiet, mostly. A few murmurs from inside the rooms, muffled behind their heavy doors, but the insane are apparently sound sleepers. Stiles is a little nervous to realize he recognizes a few of the names on the doors, people who had shown up in the newspaper and then were never heard from again.

He pauses for a long time outside one door, where a girl with wild red tangles crouches by the wall, hands over her ears and her eyes scrunched shut as she hides from something Stiles can't see. He'd known her in high school; she was the smartest girl he knew, and he'd had an enormous crush on her. Somehow he had never imagined their reunion being quite like this.

He can hear her whimpering through the door, and he thinks for a moment, swaying back and forth as he makes his decision. He bites his lip and knocks on the door, gently and quietly. Her cries cut off, and he backs away from the door quickly. Her face fills the small window, purple shadows deep beneath her wild green eyes.

"Hello?" she whispers, and her eyes skate right over Stiles. "Is someone there?"

Stiles ducks his head and waves awkwardly. "Hi…hi, Lydia," he says.

She flinches, whirling around to face her empty room. "Peter?" she asks. "Peter, can you hear him? There's someone else there."

"Oookay," Stiles says, backing up until he hits the door opposite Lydia's. So Lydia apparently couldn't see him. Or hear him. That wasn't much of a change from high school. Or from girls in college, for that matter.

He shakes his head, and he hears the sound of Lydia settling back down, asking someone called Peter to tell her about the house with the big windows full of sun. He shines his flashlight on the little name plate of the door he bumped into—Allison. Stiles is in the girls' wing, apparently.

Scott had dated Allison in high school, if Stiles remembered right, and had been totally convinced they were going to have 2.3 children and a dog in a little house with a rose garden and a picket fence. Then her mother had committed suicide, and Allison had shot a boy full of arrows. No one had seen it coming; she'd been mourning one day, and murderous the next. Scott had been broken hearted, and when Stiles peers through her window, he can see photos of the two of them, stuck with putty to the wall above Allison's bed. She's sleeping peacefully, her dark curls spread across the white sheets, illuminated by the yellow glow of the streetlights that came in through her window. Stiles wonders if she's still violent, still convinced her mother's death had been caused by the boy down the street.

He leaves the girls' wing behind, the sounds of Lydia's one sided conversation fading behind him. He knows sound travels well in here usually, but now it seems muted, slow, as if the sound waves are traveling through water and not air. He passes names of his high school classmates; Jackson Whittemore, star of the lacrosse team until he'd stabbed himself in the stomach in the middle of a game. No one had ever figured that one totally out—depressive, but delusional, too. When they'd searched his house, they'd found piles and piles of DVDs, and when they played them, all they showed were night after night of Jackson lying in bed, motionless and asleep.

Stiles had kept in touch with Danny, the cute gay guy who'd been Jackson's best friend, and every now and then he'd mention that he'd gone to see Jackson. Stiles was always hesitant to ask how he'd been doing—he and Jackson had never been close, never even been civil to each other, and he was always nervous Danny would think he was asking out of a nosy desire to get his undergrad claws into a complicated case. Danny had told him, though, that most of the time Jackson would be unresponsive. The only times he spoke, he told Danny to stay inside on the night of the full moon. Sometimes he would cry, Danny had said into the phone one night, going a few drinks strong and unusually forthcoming about his old best friend. He would hold Danny's shoulders and tell him about the voice in his head that made him do things, horrible things, and about the blood under his finger nails and how it would never come out.

He passes Matt's room, too, the creep that had stalked Allison. Which, surprisingly, was not what he was in for, as far as Stiles could tell. When he'd gotten found out, he'd been suspended, and Allison's family had issued a restraining order, but finding him here is a surprise to Stiles. He sees him huddled up on his bed, arms wrapped around his knees. He watches for a while, and Matt sucks in huge, deep, gulping breaths, as if surfacing from a dark ocean only he can see. For all Stiles knows, he is.

In one room, a solitary man sits silhouetted in a beam of light coming from his window. He's in a wheelchair, and Stiles feels a cold squeeze in his stomach when he realizes the occupant is Peter Hale. It's just a coincidence, Stiles tells himself, and he quickly moves away.

His footsteps squeak softly on the linoleum, muffled by the low hum of the generators. Lights out in the psychiatric ward is ten, and only Harris' office is lit. Stiles keeps his flashlight trained on the ground now, unwilling to see how many more of his past friends and classmates ended up here. Him and Scott and Danny are alright, he thinks. Once Boyd had recovered from Allison's attack, he'd been alright too.

"Hey, little red," comes a cooing voice from behind a door, and Stiles staggers back, his knees going weak at the shock of hearing someone address him. It's been a few hours, and Stiles had lost track of his wandering—he's almost at the end of a hallway, with one cell at the end and two on either side of the hallway, facing each other.

Stiles turns to the door that had just spoken to him, the one on the right—there's no one at the window, and, curiosity overwhelming him, he edges closer, readjusting sweaty hands on the flashlight.

There's a bright flash of teeth—a smile or a snarl, and Stiles is leaping backwards, cursing a blue streak as he drops the flashlight. It rolls down the hall, the erratic beam of light showing him quick patches of sick green wall and steel door. He scrambles after it, fighting to control his arms and legs as a high pitched laugh echoes after him.

As soon as he grabs the flashlight he abandons his dignity and sprints away, heart pounding in his throat. He waits out the rest of his shift just outside the pool of light by Harris' office.

He sleeps fitfully through the next day, barely waking up in time to squeeze some studying in before he leaves for his second night of work.

Tonight Lydia is quiet, laying in her bed with a smile on her face, but Allison is awake. She sits straight up, eyes staring straight ahead, her pretty full lips bitten into a tight line of fury. Stiles hurries past their rooms; he hadn't tangled with Allison before she'd gotten sick, and he sure as hell wasn't going to deal with her now she apparently thought it was okay to turn someone into a pincushion.

Jackson is lying flat on his back, but there's a shine of light that tells Stiles that his eyes are still open. Stiles feels a quick burst of pity; Jackson had had it all.

Matt is talking to himself. "Do you know what it's like to drown?" he's saying as Stiles passes, and against his better judgment, Stiles lingers outside the door, cupping a hand around his flashlight to shield the beam. "Dark water filling you up, pushing out every last bit of air until you're stuffed, there's no room for you or your thoughts or anything, all it is is water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink." He laughs, and it's a disturbingly lucid sound.

Stiles hurries away, not stopping by Peter's door. Though the man is silent and motionless, there's something about him that scares Stiles worse than anyone else.

He hesitates before heading down the long, dark hallway with the three doors, but his feet are moving before he can stop them. The door that laughed at him is called Erika, and when he looks inside, there's a blonde bombshell waiting for him, laying on her side in her hospital issue cotton pajamas. She smiles, a dangerous, terrifying curl of red lips over white teeth.

"You come back, little red?" she asks, slipping of the bed. She sways over to him and taps a long finger nail on the glass window. "Wanna come in?"

Stiles swallows, hard. "Pass."

"Erika, knock it off," says a voice behind him, and Stiles ducks to the ground as if the words are bullets. He can feel panic edging up his spine, making the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The voices here are clearer, like there's nothing between him and the speakers but air.

The boy in the room across the hall has a mop of curly hair and big eyes, and he's looking disapprovingly across at Erika. There's something wrong with them, with the kids in these rooms, and they're not like poor sad broken Lydia and Jackson, or Allison with her shattered mind that's only here some of the time. They're dangerous and they're alive, and they're looking at Stiles and grinning their sharp toothed smiles and he wants to run, there's an animal instinct in him that wants to run and never come back.

He stands his ground though, because this is his job and one day he's going to fix people like this, give them back their minds and their futures and make them stop hurting and he can't be scared of them.

"Isaac," he reads from the name tag on the boy's door.

"Hey," Isaac says, waving politely. "Don't mind Erika. It's been a long time since she's gotten any action and she gets a little antsy."

"Uh, okay," Stiles says, and he realizes Erika has moved away from her window. There's a thump, and he hears her calling the name Derek.

Cold fear rises up in him as he realizes that's the name of the occupant of the last room. He'd known Derek Hale even before now—he, his Uncle Peter, and his sister Laura had been the only survivors of the Hale house fire, until Derek had killed Laura. Cut her in half and buried her beneath the ashen shell of their house. Stiles had been nine or ten when it had happened, and his dad had tried to keep the details from him, but Stiles had always been good at research and it hadn't taken him long to put the pieces together.

"What do you want?" Derek's voice is a sleepy murmur, raspy and rough as he shakes off whatever dreams or nightmares a killer has.

"Check out the new kid," she tells him.

"No," Derek replies, and after that, Erika can't get a rise out of him. She returns to her window, prettily disgruntled.

"He's awful," she informs Stiles. "Worst Alpha ever."

Isaac opens his mouth and hisses at her, and she sticks her tongue out at him. Stiles starts backing away; the noise Isaac had made had not been totally human, and he doesn't want to stick around to find out what happens if Derek does take an interest in him.

"Been lovely chatting, see you all tomorrow," he says, and he's gone down the hallway before either of them can call him back.

The next night Lydia is loud again, moaning and gasping, and Stiles hears Peter's name. He's not sure if Peter is hurting her or fucking her, or maybe it's both, and he hurries away, hands over his ears. The moans follow him down the halls, and it's making the other inmates restless. Jackson is pacing his room, snarling and flexing his hands, and Allison is standing straight up, one arm extended in front of her and one arm pulled back as she fires arrow after imaginary arrow.

Peter Hale is motionless in his room, but tonight Stiles can hear him breathing.

He's almost relieved when Erika calls out "Little red!" from down the hall, because at least she and Isaac are no crazier than usual.

He ends up sitting in the hall between her and Isaac's doors, talking about movies.

"Who are they?" Stiles asks Mrs. McCall. "The ones at the end of the hall. What did they do?"

Her face tightens. "They called themselves the Pack," she says. "And they hurt people."

"Not _the _Pack," Erika says that night, rolling her eyes. "A pack. Just one."

"And we didn't hurt people," Isaac says. "We protected our own."

It gets easier, after a few days. He spends most of his nights talking to Erika and Isaac, who are pretty okay kids for being insane.

Some nights are worse than others. Allison screams some nights, wordless shrieks of rage that come from so far deep inside her Stiles is sure it's ripping her to shreds. Once Jackson was crouched on the iron headboard of his bed, balanced perfectly, unblinkingly for the entire time Stiles was on duty. Matt can't breathe sometimes, and those nights are the worst, because Stiles has to unlock his door and go in, pat him on the back until he coughs up invisible water.

"You saw me," Matt says, those nights, eyes full of tears. "You saved me."

Erika says she and Isaac and Derek are wolves. Stiles shrugs, and says okay.

Isaac just smiles and tells him he'll see.

There's only another two months before Stiles finishes his summer courses and he goes back to his campus. There's nobody to talk to back in Beacon Hills. Stiles feels like he's shriveling up, shrinking back on himself.

Lydia cries about purple flowers, and Stiles finds them crushed on the floor outside her door. He picks one up and it smells like rotten fruit and fever, so he finds a pan and sweeps them up and throws them out.

The moon sheds silver light on Allison as she fires invisible arrows at the wall. Sometimes she holds the picture of Scott. Sometimes she holds one of her mother.

Jackson scratches at the door all night some times, pleading for his freedom.

Matt has a camera now, and sometimes he'll hold it up to his window and take pictures of Stiles as he passes. The flash always blinds him, and he always panics until the spots clear from his eyes.

He remembers the way the panic attacks had felt after his mother died; choking, thick and heavy like smoke in the air, like water in his lungs.

Erika has gorgeous hair. Somehow she and Isaac are the only ones who look healthy here. As time goes by, they seem to get stronger and stronger until they practically glow as bright as the moon that shines in through their windows.

He doesn't see Derek for almost two weeks.

When he does, he doesn't know what to think. Derek glares through the window at him, and he tells him he stinks.

"Rude," Stiles says immediately, his mouth moving before his brain. Derek is wearing his own clothes, a black t-shirt and jeans despite the hour, and his hair is tangled and black, and there's dark scruff on his chin. His eyes are green and sharp, and Stiles just can't see anything crazy in them.

"He's right though," Erika says, wrinkling her nose. "Like something dead."

Stiles pulls a handful of purple flowers from the pocket of his hoodie. "Is it this stuff?" He finds it outside Lydia's room almost nightly now, and he keeps forgetting to ask Harris what it is.

All three inmates recoil from the door with hisses, teeth bared. Stiles swears Derek's eyes are glowing like a cats'.

"Get _rid _of it," Derek orders, "and don't ever come back with it."

Stiles doesn't know why he's taking orders from an inmate, but he does, and when he comes back, Derek is still glaring at him. "You still stink," he tells him.

Stiles leaves as the sun rises, unreasonably irritated, and washes his scrubs and hoodie before he goes to sleep.

He studies during the day. His father is at work and Scott is at school, so Stiles turns on the TV for a little bit of background noise and he studies. Jackson might be paranoid schizophrenic, he thinks, but Stiles doesn't know what the pack is.

There's a man in Jackson's head, and he's making Jackson do bad things, Jackson whispers through the crack of his door. Stiles has to strain to hear the inmates' words here—the only place he can hear them with no trouble is in the long dark hall way with the three rooms.

"Please get him out," Jackson begs him. "I'll tell my parents I love them. Just get him out."

Derek is the one who tells him about being a wolf. Stiles sits with his back to Derek's door.

"You smell afraid," Derek tells him. "I can hear your heart beat as soon as you walk into the hospital, and it gets louder and faster as you get closer."

"I'm not afraid of you," Stiles insists.

"Now you're lying," Derek says. "Your heart beat hitches for just a second when you do that. When I'm looking at you and you lie, your eyes drop for half a second."

Derek can smell and hear and see his emotions as well as if Stiles were announcing them aloud. Derek can run faster than a human, faster than a car, and when he gets hurt it takes him seconds to heal, skin and muscle knitting back together, bone realigning.

"We don't get sick anymore," Erika tells him.

"We don't get hurt," Isaac says.

They each sit closer and closer to the window as the month goes by, in the little pool of moonlight that collects like silver on their floors.

The days are slow and sticky hot, empty and quiet and lonely. He finds himself eager to get to the ward now, if only to have some conversation.

There are purple flowers outside Peter Hale's room now. Stiles had remembered to ask, but Harris had not had an answer. The smell of sickness and fear links the two rooms, and Stiles had no doubt now that the Peter in Lydia's mind is the one down the hall.

"Leave her _alone_," he snarls through the window one night. Peter doesn't answer, but down the hallway he hears Lydia shriek a high laugh.

Derek used to run in the moonlight, he tells Stiles. They all ran together, the whole Hale family. The pack is stronger together. Stiles can't imagine what that would be like, to be so connected to other people that their strength is your strength.

Erika longs for it, and Stiles can hear it in her voice; to run again, stretch her muscles and her lungs until they burn, use her body as it was meant to be used, to run and hunt and howl.

The way Derek describes it, in his low voice and with his stilted words, Stiles can almost smell the forest, crisp and spicy and alive. Smoke runs through it all though, thick and sinuously knotting itself around Derek's words.

"I didn't kill my sister," he says one day, and Stiles is surprised to find that he's actually not surprised. "Peter did."

"The comatose one?" Stiles asks.

"Yeah," Derek replies.

The next night, Lydia is crying on her bed. Stiles unlocks her door and slips in. "Hi," he says, to let her know he's here, and she looks up at him. She's beautiful, even with tear tracks down her face and her hair a snarled mess.

Stiles leaves the light off, because the moon is enough for now, but he grabs a brush off her nightstand and sits behind her on the bed, working through the tangles until her hair shines like fire again.

Allison is standing by her door when he leaves, after Lydia has fallen asleep to the slow cadence of his chatter.

"That was nice of you," she says, and it's the first time he's heard her speak in years. She sounds the same, but sadder.

"Thanks?" he says nervously.

"The pack killed my mother," Allison tells him bitterly, and Stiles starts to back away. "Stay away from them or they'll kill you too, Stiles," she shouts as he leaves as quickly as he can.

"We did _not!"_ Erika exclaims.

"It was self-defense," Isaac says irritably.

"She stabbed me in the back," Derek says. "I bit her when I was fighting her off, and she refused to live as a wolf." It's one of the nights Derek is working out—that's most nights, actually, but Stiles is only lucky enough to catch him in the act sometimes. He does one armed pushups, pull ups from the door frame, crunches on the floor. He stretches, muscles pulled lean and tight, the sweat on his body catching the moonlight and making him shine.

"Oh," Stiles says. It makes sense, in a way. As a story, in a narrative sense. Not in a real life sense. "What is Peter doing to Lydia?" he asks suddenly. There's a thump as Derek drops to the floor, a quiet intake of breath that is the only indication he is exerting himself.

There is silence from Derek's room. "He got her to heal him," he says, "and now he won't leave her alone."

"Can I help?" Stiles asks, desperately.

Derek sounds amused. "You don't think I'm crazy?"

"I'm going to be a doctor," Stiles says, offended. "It doesn't matter if you're crazy or not. I can still try to fix you."

There's a quiet sound that might be a huff. "Good luck," Derek says. "Lydia has to save herself."

The fire killed twelve members of Derek Hale's family. Laura Hale had been buried in a circle of wolfsbane, a purple flower that smelled like a fever and left purple stains on linoleum floors.

All the members of Derek's family who had attended Beacon Hills High School had been exceptionally athletically gifted. The hospital had no record of admittance of any of them, and they had no private doctor that Stiles could find.

They had spent a lot of money at the local vet's, however.

Stiles is sitting on Erika's bed, putting her hair in a French braid, when Derek starts talking from his room. He'd been in to visit almost everyone in the ward, but he steered clear of Allison's room, Peter's room, and Derek's.

"Laura was a writer," Derek says. "A poet."

Erika stills beneath his hands, and Stiles can tell this isn't information usually given. "Oh?" he says, carefully combing a strand of honey blonde into place with his fingers.

"She was good with words. She got all of that. I'm…not," Derek says. "I don't need to be. Peter has it too. He can talk the shirt off your back." Briefly, Stiles considers attempting the same feat. "She tried to get me to stay here after the fire, but…I couldn't. I came back once I heard she'd been killed."

"The fire…was an accident, right?" Stiles asks, and Derek doesn't answer. He doesn't answer for another three nights, and before he does, he orders Isaac and Erika to put their pillows over their heads, and says he'll know if they don't.

"It was a girl," Derek tells him tersely. "Allison's aunt." He pauses to breathe and Stiles stands, finding Derek standing on the other side of the door, locking him with a steely green gaze. "You can't tell anyone this, or I'll rip your throat out with my teeth."

The idea of Derek's teeth on his throat is more interesting than Stiles is ready to devote thought to, but he's pretty sure Derek will be able to tell if his mind wanders, so he raises three fingers and says, "Scouts' honor."

"Her name was Kate. And I was 15." Derek stops, running his hands through his hair and making it stand up at odd angles. "The Argents—that family—they hunt us. Werewolves," he stopped. Stiles had never heard any of them use the word aloud, werewolves—they called themselves wolves, or pack. Werewolves sounded crazy. Delusional.

"She used me to find my family. Burnt it down. Got us all."

"Not you," Stiles says softly. He has an insane urge to open the door, to hug Derek. He looks so hurt, and Stiles doesn't care if he's crazy or a murderer or any of that, he's just Derek and he's in pain.

"Not me," Derek agrees. "Peter killed her," Derek continues. "Her father came after that, tore up the town trying to hunt me and the pack down. You would've been a—" Derek pauses, his brow wrinkling as he thinks. "A sophomore I think."

Stiles thinks back, remembering vaguely that they had gotten a new principal that year, and that it had been Allison's grandfather. He wondered if that had had anything to do with what Derek was telling him.

"It turned out fine, but Kate was dead, Allison's mother was dead, and Jackson and Lydia were…broken. They locked the three of us up. Boyd escaped," Derek says.

"Boyd?" Stiles says, unable to keep the surprise from his voice.

A smile touches the corner of Derek's mouth. "He was always the smartest one," Derek says.

"You obviously couldn't be," Stiles teases, then flinches back as Derek smacks his hand against the window.

"Come in here and say that again," the older man challenges.

Stiles does. He unlocks the door and walks in and he says it again, tells Derek he's stupid and that it isn't his fault. He tells Derek he did the best he could, and at least he and the others are alive. Derek's hands are on him, and his heart rate is through the roof and he knows Derek can hear it. The moon is high and Derek's eyes are green and bright, and Derek's mouth is hot. His stubble drags across Stiles' neck and Derek grabs his chin, and tips back his head.

Stiles is talking, he knows he's talking and he knows he should shut up, but Derek's teeth pressed against his throat and for a moment he's sure this is how he's going to die, having his jugular torn out by an inmate in an insane asylum. But Derek's not crazy, and neither is Isaac nor Erika, they're lucid and a hell of a lot more rational than Stiles, or else he wouldn't be in here with maybe-crazy maybe-not Derek Hale.

The moon is high, and Derek's hands are sliding under his shirt, and he's kissing Stiles and there's the slow pull of teeth against his lips, and those teeth felt a little sharper than they probably should, but Stiles is no expert on dentistry and he doesn't question it.

All of a sudden, Derek is across the room, staring out the window.

Stiles is left to straighten his clothes, panting. "Excuse me sorry what?" he says.

"I'm not insane," Derek says.

"…Of course not?" Stiles offers.

"Come back in two days," Derek says. He won't answer any more questions, and Stiles leaves, frustrated and angry. Erika wolf whistles at him as he passes, and he flips her off.

Derek refuses to talk to him the next night, and when Stiles checks his calendar he sees that tomorrow is the full moon.

The entire ward is wild that night. There are purple flowers everywhere outside Lydia's room, and they lead all the way down to Peter's door. She's dancing barefoot beneath her window, waltzing with a shadow that looks tall and strong.

Allison sits on her bed with a knife in her hands. Stiles doesn't know where she got it but when he goes to try to take it away she looks at him and says coolly, "I'm not going to hurt myself. I'm going to hurt anyone who touches me." He backs away, hands raised, and locks the door behind him.

Jackson is writhing on the ground, and his skin looks tough and scaled. Stiles thinks about what Erika told him about the kanima, and he quickly leaves.

Matt is crying.

Peter is standing, his wheelchair apparently forgotten, and he turns a whole, unscarred face to Stiles to fix him with a sardonic grin. "Welcome to the wild side," he says, and Stiles backs away, drops his flashlight, and runs.

Erika is waiting for him outside her room, and he doesn't know how she got out. When he asks her how she did, she holds up one hand, and her nails look longer and sharper than they did. She unlocks Isaac's door without asking him, and then jerks her head towards Derek's door.

"He's waiting for you," she says, and Stiles goes in without hesitating.

Derek is standing in the moonlight, eyes closed. "Look," he tells Stiles, and he jerks his head. His ears sharpen, his brow flattens and his nose lengthens, hair grows rapidly down his cheeks and his fingers stretch into claws. When he turns, his eyes are blood red, and when he opens his mouth, his teeth are long and sharp.

"Oh," Stiles says. "So that stuff—"

"It was true." Derek stalks towards him and jerks his head again. The hair vanishes and his face smoothes, but his eyes are still red and his teeth are still sharp as they scrape against Stiles' lips. "Are you going to let me out?" he asks against Stiles' mouth. "Are you going to let us run?"

Stiles doesn't have a choice. "Yes," he gasps. His hands are pressed against Derek's chest, and he can feel a rumble building there, like a growl.

"Good," Derek breathes. With one arm around Stiles' waist, he kicks open the door.

Isaac and Erika grin at him, their eyes inhumanly yellow. Stiles leads them out of the ward, unlocking doors and letting moonlight and fresh air flood in. Derek is whispering encouragements Stiles hardly needs, little kisses against his neck and touches on his hands to keep him going.

They stand in the yard, under the full moon, away from the smell of fever and sweat and sickness. The wolves howl, and it shakes Stiles to the ground.

They run, and Stiles runs with them.


End file.
